Short story writer Alice Munro has said "I just love the honour" of winning the Nobel prize in literature, an award which is to be collected on her behalf by daughter Jenny at a lavish ceremony in Stockholm in a few hours' time.

Munro, who at 82 is too frail to fly, shared her joy at receiving the $1.3m (£790,000) prize, and thoughts on being the 13th woman to win it, in a video interview on the Nobel Prize website. Traditionally, Nobel winners accept their prize with a grand formal lecture, some of which have become literary landmarks in their own right, but her response was in the form of a 30-minute interview. "Oh, no, no! I was a woman! But there are women who have won it, I know. I just love the honour, I love it, but I just didn't think that way, because most writers probably underestimate their work, especially after it's done. You don't go around and tell your friends that 'I will probably win the Nobel prize'.

Munro was acclaimed as a "master of the short story" by Swedish academy permanent secretary Peter Englund when she won the prize in October.

As a young girl in southwestern Ontario, Munro said, she was inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid to imagine her own story with a happier ending, and continued to make up stories. "I had a long walk to school, and during that walk I would generally make up stories. As I got older the stories would be more and more about myself, as a heroine in some situation or other … "

At first, she was secretive about her literary aspirations. "The people around me didn't know that I wanted to be a writer, 'cause I didn't let them find out – it would have seemed to most people ridiculous." But later, as a housewife bringing up two daughters in British Columbia in the early 1950s, Munro began to establish her ground as a writer.

"You know, this is kind of a special thing with growing up as I did. If anybody read, it was the women, if anybody had the education it was often the woman; it would have been a school teacher or something like that, and far from being closed to women, the world of reading and writing was widely more open to women than it was to men, men being farmers or doing different kinds of work." She went on to say that women writers today "have a much, I wouldn't say easier time, but it's much more OK now for women to be doing something important, not just fooling around with 'a little game that she does while everybody else is out of the house', but to be really serious about writing, as a man would write."

Munro's stories set in small town rural communities have led her work to be dismissed by some as boring and domestic. Novelist Bret Easton Ellis decried her as "so completely overrated". But asked what is so interesting about life in rural Canada, Munro said in her Nobel interview: "You just have to be there."

In June this year, Munro said she would give up writing, and now she has explained why: "Well, I gave up writing, when was it, maybe a year ago, but that was a decision, that was not wanting to write and not being able to, a decision that I wanted to behave like the rest of the world. Because when you are writing you are doing something that other people don't know you are doing, and you can't really talk about it, you are always finding your way in this secret world, and then you are doing something else in the normal world. And I am sort of getting tired of that – I have done it all my life, absolutely all my life."